Busyness is Not a Badge of Honor

Why do people seem to take so much pride in how busy they are? I'm all for hard work, but if you don't have time for anything else, what's the point? -- Please leave a review and subscribe so you never miss an episode! Questions and comments can also be emailed to [email protected]. Connect with me through your favorite platform: https://pods.link/aardvarkgirl -- Because this seems to keep coming up in my conversations, both on this podcast and outside of it, I want to talk about it more specifically. There’s an epidemic out there, at least in America, where people use the word “busy” as an emblem of pride. “I’m soooo busy.” “Oh, work is great. I barely have time to sleep.” “Oh man, I was so slammed today I completely forgot to eat.” “You gotta hustle.” I’m sure you’ve heard all this before. But why? We do you “gotta” hustle? I’m all for hard work, as you know. You don’t find success by doing nothing. But if you’re working so hard that you don’t have time for anything else, what’s the point? Even if you love what you do, you need time for other things. You need a mental break from work. Time with people who aren’t your clients and vendors, even if it’s not in person. If you Google quotes for motivation, you’ll find all kinds of memes about the hustle that are meant to be inspirational. So I’m sure my opinion on this matter is not the norm. It often isn’t. But I have never had the goal to be busy. I’ve wanted to accomplish things. I’ve wanted to be successful. I’ve wanted specific outcomes to result from my hard work. But I have never once thought, I wish I was busier. My definition of successful doesn’t include constant busyness. I don’t want to be so busy building an empire that there isn’t time for anything else. Maybe that means I’ll never have an international multi-billion dollar corporation to my name, but that’s okay with me. When I was contemplating leaving the corporate world, many people assumed I would start my own production company. It would’ve made sense considering I’d been managing them for so many years. But I never had any interest in that. I didn’t want a company with a building and employees and overhead and all the hassle that comes with that. I wanted something simple, where all I really needed was my laptop, minimal software, and an Internet connection. I didn’t want other people relying on me for their salaries and livelihood. I didn’t want to be stuck at another place for several hours a day, unless that place was my home. I really just wanted to do my own thing. That’s what I’ve been doing ever since. I know I’ve said it here before, but my biggest goal in starting my business was to make more and work less. That was it. Sure, I wanted to enjoy my work more by choosing the people around me and what my schedule would be. I wanted the freedom of self-employment. I still enjoy that every single day. Goal accomplished. But as I was working my way here, I never used the word hustle, or even thought of it in that manner. Like many of you, I started building my business while I was still employed full-time. I didn’t feel ready to just throw caution to the wind and let go of my stable income. I still had a lot of things to figure out, and at the time, I thought it was best to try to do both. But I never called Aardvark Girl my side hustle. I wasn’t moonlighting or freelancing “on the side.” I always had that mindset that I was building a business. Of course, I was working extra hours when I was balancing them both, but that only lasted for a few months. I learned pretty early on that the 40-50 hours a week I was spending at my job was 40-50 hours a week I could be working on my own business. I wasn’t going to find the right clients and projects when I only had a few spare hours a day. So if I was going to give my time and energy to a company, I might as well do it for mine, right? But that type of thinking goes back way further than that for me. I got my first job when I was 16. I remember tel